Monday, January 21, 2008

Torture Insurance.

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

In Legal Cases, C.I.A. Officers Turn to Insurer - New York Times:
"...Like a growing number of C.I.A. employees, Mr. Rodriguez, former head of the agency’s clandestine service, had bought professional liability insurance from Wright & Company. The firm, founded in 1965 by a former F.B.I. agent, is now paying his mounting legal bills.

The standard Wright policy costs a little less than $300 a year. The government pays half the premium for all supervisors and certain other high-risk employees, a group that includes hundreds of C.I.A. officers, including everyone at the agency involved in counterterrorism or counterproliferation.

...spurred in part by a spate of lawsuits, investigations and criminal prosecutions related to mistreatment of detainees from Iraq to Guantánamo Bay, an immigration crackdown and other aftershocks of 9/11. The insurance is popular with F.B.I. agents, Secret Service officers, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement workers as well as C.I.A. officers.

“The things that help us are any negative events related to the federal government, and there have been plenty,” said Bryan B. Lewis, Wright’s president and chief executive, who holds a security clearance that allows him to discuss his clients’ secret business.

...the spectacle of C.I.A. officers under investigation has been a recurring drama in Washington. In 1973, as domestic spying and foreign assassination plots by the agency came under review, a memorandum from headquarters warned officers that the agency would not represent them in case of legal trouble. It became known in-house as the “get-your-own-lawyer cable,” veteran case officers recalled.

Since the late 1980s, however, Wright and a handful of competitors have offered at least some shelter from bankrupting legal costs. The Justice Department will represent federal employees in noncriminal matters if it is judged to be in the government’s interest and the employee’s acts were within the scope of his employment. But government lawyers represent the government’s interest, and an employee facing potentially serious accusations may want a lawyer looking out just for him.

One former C.I.A. officer said he bought the insurance because when a scandal broke “you figured the government would moonwalk away from you as fast as it could.”"

Not even the government counts on the government.

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